Towards a Justice-focused Improvement Science

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Criticality, Justice, and Liberation in Improvement Science (Table 1)

Abstract

We argue in this paper that continuous improvement has largely centered equity and pushed justice to the periphery. In particular, we argue that the field of CI in education has focused squarely on equity—what we define as reducing racial and other gaps in dominant outcomes. In so doing, CI has deprioritized justice, which we define as improving outcomes that center on the comfort, agency, and dignity of all students, but minoritized students (i.e., Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled, multilingual youth, and working-class) in particular. In so doing, CI efforts risk upholding dominant schooling outcomes and accompanying practices that sort students into unequal categories (Domina et al., 2017), limiting the capability of minoritized students to reach their full potential, erasing and demeaning students’ cultural wealth, knowledge, and identities, and restricting their access to rich learning opportunities (Battey & Leyva, 2016; Cunningham, 2019; King, 2017; Stovall, 2018). We argue for a justice-focused continuous improvement that: a) confronts dominant outcomes rather than uncritically prioritizing them; and b) aims to use its tools to create systems that prioritize outcomes that grant comfort, agency, and dignity to minoritized students and communities.
In our full paper, we first interrogate dominant educational outcomes that often organize improvement work. These outcomes—such as standardized test scores and attendance in schools—often serve to enact epistemological erasure and violence against minoritized students (Cunningham, 2019; King, 2017) as well as categorize and sort students for labor markets, thereby producing inequities (Domina et al., 2017). We instead offer a different set of student outcomes more oriented towards justice: comfort, dignity, and agency.
Building from these justice-focused outcomes, we then articulate a working set of justice-focused improvement practices: 1) foreground epistemic heterogeneity; 2) develop axiological rigor in improvement; 3) humanize minoritized students and communities; 4) make empathy work critical; and 5) analyze systems as practiced and not disembodied. In our full paper, we offer descriptions of each practice and hypothesize how each practice will lead to the student outcomes of comfort, agency, and dignity. The five practices we articulate here are not meant to be comprehensive, but instead serve a catalytic function to identify how justice-focused improvement might be and is enacted.
We illustrate these practices using a public exemplar in the case of the Menomonee Falls School District (MFSD). MFSD had been spotlighted several times by the Carnegie Foundation and EdWeek for their use of continuous improvement systemwide. We use this case as critical friends, highlighting where MFSD’s work fell short of, move towards, and came close to achieving justice for students. In our application of the five justice-focused improvement practices to this case, we find that while some of MFSD’s work began to move towards justice, some aspects of their work raise questions about the outcomes that improvement work ought to prioritize. We end the paper by connecting to the field’s extant literature on equity and continuous improvement, and offer directions for future research to move the field towards justice.

Authors

• Carlos Sandoval, Clemson University

• Rebecca Colina Neri, Indiana University